Road Trip

Tomorrow, I report to the dive shop no later than 5:30AM. We’ll drive five hours to Santa Rosa, NM for our PADI Open Water Diver certification.

Normally, that’s four dives over two and a half days, followed by the five hour drive back home. That’s just too damn sensible for my tastes.

So in the same short time bookended by the same long drives, I’ll be getting my basic cert and my Advanced Open Water cert.

Why the Advanced cert? Well, Melissa is a pretty serious diver, and I’d like to be, so I figure our someday our kids will, too. So it makes some sense to have one of us trained as a Rescue Diver — and you have to complete Advanced before you can take Rescue.

But none of that chages the fact that I’ll be trying to do a total of nine dives and 650 miles of road in about 65 hours. Did I mention the water at Blue Hole is a chilly 61

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1.
Fred Purkey

Watch your buoyancy: take your time to establish it early on. Don’t go nuts with inflating and deflating your BCD, let the inflation/deflation take effect since people usually expect it to work instantly. Breathe slowly and deeply. Oh yes, the part where you take off & put on your BCD in the water is a bitch. I did my certification in 56 degree water in the Great Lakes (hood & gloves required), and after the exercises were out of the way we saw some wooden shipwrecks.

Once all that is out of the way, head down south to Cozumel or the Cayman Islands, and have a blast. Good Luck.

Watch your buoyancy: take your time to establish it early on. Don’t go nuts with inflating and deflating your BCD, let the inflation/deflation take effect since people usually expect it to work instantly. Breathe slowly and deeply. Oh yes, the part where you take off & put on your BCD in the water is a bitch. I did my certification in 56 degree water in the Great Lakes (hood & gloves required), and after the exercises were out of the way we saw some wooden shipwrecks.

Once all that is out of the way, head down south to Cozumel or the Cayman Islands, and have a blast. Good Luck.

Christ, VP…, it’s not like you’ve cornered the market on idiots and dives. I’ve been an idiot in many a dive. So have most of your readers, I venture to guess…

Your wedding fast approaches. We (your readers) have huddled while you were busy and not paying attention. We have decided to meet in a secret canyon in those Hard-as-a-Rocky Mountains of yours to decide upon a gift for you and Melissa.

Chilly water is why god invented neoprene. If its still too chilly, scrounge around for a hood – same principle as going outside in winter with your head uncovered.

Have fun – the trials and tribulation will be laughable the first time you plunk in the water and find 100 foot visibility all the way to the bottom, and the best part is, you can go there and check it all out!

Last noteDON’T TOUCH THE CORAL! (when you get someplace that actually has some)

I wouldn’t do that. That many dives in two days in cold water when you’re tired raises your risk of decompression sickness significantly, unless they’re pretty damned shallow. And it’s dangerous to dive, or drive, that tired.

Did my dive instruction way back when in a Texas reservoir, low visibility was *normal* Did quite a few dives in the Red Sea following our little dust-up in ’91.

Lionfish are cool and thank gawd they’re slower swimmers than me

Calamari are funny looking in the water, just like on the plate.

Rounding a coral head and barging into the middle of a school of barracuda is *interesting*, good thing we didn’t look like chum.

Wear a hood after you go bald, our boss had a remora decide his head was a good spot to hang on from.

Sea urchins love hiding out in the pits and chambers of old coral. Dive boots will not slow them down.

A 1000 yard walk across ancient coral and dodging sea urchins wearing all your gear to get to the ledge to dive from is not fun but once you’re there the view is interesting. The walk back sucks most mightily. A sandy slope gets you diving sooner, but isn’t as visually appealling as soon.

I went back and looked at the log for my cert dives. It was the first week of November in a quarry in PA. Water temp was 35 degrees! I wore a thick, skin-in wet suit, but it was still darned cold. 2 people from our group didn’t complete the certification because of the cold. At 61 you’ll do fine. After 10+ years of diving I still think it is the absolute coolest thing in the world every time I find myself underwater and breathing. Have a great trip!

I took my open water and advanced open water certifications in Barbados, in just a bikini (and the manditory “I’m of Irish ancestry and white as the inside of a potato” sunblock). I heartily recommend your next certification be done in the Caribbearn.

Or, you could pack on a few pounds. My mentor in university was a PADI divemaster and he was forever trying to get me to dive the St. Lawrence River by Ottawa during snowstorms. My body fat: 15%, his has to be at least 35%. It makes all the difference.